Ashland’s Light up the Tracks, a series of holiday events in the small railroad town, continues through Jan. 1. (Photo courtesy Downtown Ashland Association)
Downtown Ashland transforms itself into something out of a Hallmark movie for the holiday season each year, decking the whole town out in lights for a six-week winter celebration.
The Light up the Tracks event series, which started last month, illuminates up downtown buildings, historic homes, Randolph-Macon College and Ashland’s Center Street. According to Maggie Longest, executive director of the Downtown Ashland Association, it takes about three weeks to put up 1,000 strings of lights throughout the town. The annual event ends with “Light the Way to 2023,” in which residents and visitors are encouraged to stroll, skate or bike through downtown on New Year’s Eve.
The Downtown Ashland Association has been putting on Light up the Tracks since 2017, when Ashland artist and University of Richmond graduate Dan Bartges came to the association with the concept of lighting up the town.
“It was really his brainchild, particularly as a way to welcome train travelers, because we have an Amtrak station and the Northeast Corridor runs right through the middle of our downtown, so it was a way to create sort of a holiday postcard for train travelers at first, and it really just grew from there,” Longest says.
When asked how literally one should take the event’s name, Longest laughs and says, “The lights are not actually on the track — Amtrak would frown on that.”
It’s fitting that the town incorporates its railroad history, which dates back to the 1830s — predating the founding of the town itself — when Virginia’s first railroad was built through what is now Ashland’s downtown. Along with its railroad heritage, there are other tales about the town that move people in a different way.
Ashland Haunted History Tours started its winter season, which includes its Ghosts of Christmas Past tours with costumed Victorian characters, at the tree lighting for Light up the Tracks. dKitty Barnes, co-owner of the tour company, says her supernatural career path feels like a family calling.
“I grew up with ghost stories, and my grandmother was very big into theater and telling stories and would do it in costume,” she says. “And it’s just something that I've always loved and adored — to me, it's just part of who I am and our family tradition almost, so it's keeping that on and sharing it.”
Barens’ names the Hanover Art Center as her favorite haunted spot in Ashland.
“Paranormal investigators go in there frequently, and they always encounter some kind of activity,” she says.
Barnes mentions a story known among Ashland locals about the center allegedly having so much blood shed on its floors from its days as a Civil War hospital that a new floor had to be built over them.
“To me, that is the most fascinating thing, that whenever you walk in there, regardless of if it's for a wedding or for cute little kids’ activities, you're walking on bloody floors. You just don't know it because it's covered over,” she says of the legend.
As far as what to expect from the Ghosts of Christmas Past tour, Barnes says they include a mix of more traditional and local ghost stories with classic Victorian spooky stories such as those of Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson.
“It’s continuing the tradition in the 19th century of telling ghost stories by the fire at the end of your family celebration,” Barnes says. “Whereas we often think of rainbows and winter and Christmas trees, in Victorian times they're sitting by the fire, and they're warming their spirits with chilling tales, so it's a little bit different, but it really does tie into Ashland’s history.”
